It sounds horrible, top to bottom.

I don’t know if the writer knew they were saying this, or even if ‘Sarah’ knows this, but the second to last paragraph just made me shudder.

In cases of extreme childhood trauma, it’s pretty common to just forget most things before the trauma.
Not that the stories and clear evidence of trauma didn’t make it clear how serious this was to her. Having personal experience with the memory loss, that piece of information really drove it home how that experience wasn’t merely a collection of traumatizing moments, but was a non-stop traumatic experience for a long enough period of time that it re-wired her brain.

The misguided notion that punishment is rehabilitation needs to go in every society that still embraces it.